What is your ideal office?
A sun filled room on the river with beautiful objects and my books. Fortunately, my new studio in the West Village lives up to this ideal. In this space, there has to be a healthy balance of chaos and order to let ideas unfold and develop into strong concepts. My team and I love working on projects in different scales from small lamps, to furniture, interiors and installations, to larger buildings. For all of it we build physical models and prototypes that meet on our tables and inform one another.
Moonlight or sunlight, and why?
I used to have the most sparkling ideas at night but these days I prefer the sunlight. Without the sun and the perfect distance to it, we could not live on our Earth.
Can you describe the last dream you had?
I was catching strongly colored lights flying through the air. They felt warm and soft, and looked like tiny nebulae in a night sky over a mountainous town where I was wandering around from one dark and happy place to another, meeting old friends.
What is an idea of yours that failed?
There were many happy accidents but nothing I’d consider a failure. I always like to push ideas and materials to their limits to expose their inherent beauty. Some things need to collapse or fail during the experimental design process, but the finished product or building has to endure the test of time. For example, our Sun Path House in Miami Beach is engineered to survive 300 years of hurricanes and the rising sea level, with its dedicated outdoor dining room on the ground and all enclosed spaces lifted up in the air.
What technology excites you the most?
Anything that reveals life or connects us to the cosmos, such as the outwardly flying New Horizons spacecraft, the sun-bound Parker Solar Probe, or new instruments that detect subsurface microbiological beings deep under the surface of the Earth, and maybe my personal favorite now, fMRI, which helps neuroscientists measure and visualize our human brain activities. I’m also excited about recent developments in timber construction and solar energy technology. What I love the most is when new innovations are combined with ancient knowledge, which can be manifested physically in architecture. Ideally anything human-made connects individuals to each other, to themselves and to the cosmos.
What household item are you most suspicious of?
Guns and smart devices, where companies are collecting and selling data of the inhabitants that they claim to be serving.
When was the last time you were starstruck?
The closest to being starstruck was probably backstage after my first Bob Dylan concert in 1999, but I guess it could happen again if I encountered the Dalai Lama.
What is your favorite letter of the alphabet?
The O, it never ends and it sounds good too.
What is the most useful advice you ever received?
My mother always encouraged me to travel the world, to get to know it and eventually improve it—find places and ways to make positive changes. Another piece of advice from a friend was to trust my instincts and start my own firm when I was young and still a bit naive with youthful energy.
What is the last thing you built?
A model of a building Upstate which breaks ground in the spring. It is going to be a weekend and vacation house for my family and our friends. The physical center and source of inspiration for the project is a large balancing boulder on the highest point of a clearing in a vast quarry. Most likely the rock got dropped off by a glacier during the last ice age about twelve-thousand years ago and I look forward to living around it, in harmony with nature.
